You know you're a quilter if....

Well, I get some sewing in this weekend (YAY!). I decided to put a few quilts in my guild’s show that’s coming up next week. I usually don’t because (a) I don’t generally have anything around home that I’ve actually completed, and (b) I am usually not able to help out since it’s a one-day show on a weekday in a different county, and I hate to just have them display my stuff without contributing to the show. However, I got an email last week looking for more quilts. So I decided on my mystery quilt (previously shown, [picture below), the quilt I made for my Mom (picture below), and a Quilt Pink quilt I bought last year. I didn’t make it, but it’s a nice story and for a good cause, and it’s in my possession. ;-) I asked Mom if I could borrow her quilt for the show, and she was more than happy to oblige. She’s so excited that I get to be in a show. ;-)

The mystery quilt had a permanent sleeve, so I only had to make two sleeves. I got them made and one sewn on yesterday. This was around spending the better part of two hours pressing fabric that I washed for the baby quilt Mom and I are making. Yes, my back hurt. ;-) I was doing the hand-sewing while we were playing cards. I still have one more sleeve to hand sew on (but at least the sleeve is made)... have I mentioned how I hate hand sewing?????

Thursday I have a “Girl’s Night Out” sew time, and I have to get some fabric pressed and cut for that, and I’ll probably take the Janome because I want to do the whole project on one machine (I have a cheaper machine that I take to sew days to cut down on the computerized innards getting jostled around). My Janome and I got along quite well on Sunday, so that’s good news. I haven’t tried anything fancier than a straight stitch and winding a few bobbins, but I was successful at those, so that helped. I also love my new sewing cabinet insert – I’ve never been able to sew flush before! I’m really looking forward to doing a larger project to see how it works with that. I also was able to do a “proof of concept” of my sewing room. The lighting is awful (which I knew). I’m waiting until I’m sure on how I want things arranged before we start installing track lighting. I also had Mom sewing with me, so I got to try out more than one person in the room plus having the ironing board and cutting table set up. Needs a little more thought, but we’re making progress.

Oh, speaking of ironing boards... you know you’re a quilter when you go to Costco and your impulse purchase is an ironing board! :-p I didn’t actually buy it, but I was CLOSE! I have a spiffy space-age cover thing for the one I have now that I don’t think would fit on the new one (which is bigger), but it would be great to have a bigger board... still thinking.

That’s all the rambling I have for now... tasks for the week – a sleeve and pressing and cutting for the sew party on Thursday night! WOO HOO!!!

Easter

We had our first overnight guests (my parents) this weekend. :-) Mom and David came up Saturday and Mom and I went to sew day and Bill and David hung ceiling fixtures (bless their hearts!).

Sometime in the last couple of weeks, I came to the realization that this would be the first time since 1995 that I've spent Easter with my Mom and stepfather. (For those of you who don't know, I moved from NY to WA in 1996 and Mom and David moved from NY to WA in 2007.) I was glad that didn't set the bar too high on the expectation scale. I've gotten to a point in my life where I'd rather spend time with guests (particularly family) than to fuss over a dinner that will (hopefully) really impress them. Nevertheless, we got out the china (which Bill and I would have done even if we hadn't had guests) , and used Grandma's silver that I received after she passed away.

There was no real fanfare on Sunday - Bill and I went to church, and when we got home the four of us played cards for a while, Mom and I did a couple light sewing projects (thanks for the fingertip towels!) while Bill called his family. We had a dinner of pork chops and some sides, and later a pumpkin pie Mom had made for dessert. It was really nice to kick back and have so much of the day to just hang out and enjoy the family time. Sure, we do that now and then anyway, but still... there's that holiday factor. :-) We had a lot of laughs and just a great time together.

Just wanted to share how wonderful it was to have a family Easter and christen the china.

Sew Saturday!

Once a month, my quilt guild has an open sew on a Saturday. It's a great time to get to know people a little better and see what everyone is working on. This time I think I did more ripping than sewing - but that was the plan. ;-)

First, I made my three tissue box covers that I wanted to - two floral and one with pandas (I have a half-room that's a panda palace). The two in front (shamrocks and love) Mom made for me - the other 5 I've done (with her help, of course, since I never write down ANY instructions).

After that, I was ripping some 12x12 blocks so I would have some 6x12 pieces, plus sewing a couple 6x6 blocks together. I'm planning on making reusable grocery bags with those if I can get my serger to be a dove and cooperate. Lastly, I continued ripping some appliqué out of the Round Robin I received. Thank goodness it wasn't a satin stitch, but it was some reverse zigzag that was really a challenge in some places. There were four small motifs and I probably spent 2 hours on each one. Actually, that's not true. Mom ripped out one of them for me, so I only have about 6 hours invested. But they're GONE! There's still some residue from the fusible web and of course the needlemarks, but they're gone. Now (are you ready for this) I'd really like to rework the center block - the one I did - because it doesn't make sense to me with the rest of the quilt! It's an easy fix (just flipping a couple things around), but it is in the center of a king-size quilt top. My friend Wendy says that she can show me how to rip the quilt into four parts and sew it all back so I don't have to do inset seams. We're going to try it on something smaller first to see how badly I really want to do this. ;-)

Here's a photo of the quilt with everyone (minus one) who worked on it. It's pretty much symmetrical, so you can derive what the whole quilt looks like by what you can see. I thought I had a picture handy of just the quilt, but I can't find it.


Okay, I think that's all the news for now. :-) Just wanted to report that I actually got to move something from my "In work" list to my "Projects completed in 2008" list! YAY! Let's hear the roar of applause for the three more tissue box covers!!! (Hey, you have to celebrate each victory, right?)

QA Quilt Show and other inspirations

Saturday we went to the Quilters Anonymous quilt show for two reasons:
1. Because we could
2. Because my name was in the program
Having said that, I'm pretty happy with what II worked on a Round Robin quilt a couple years ago, and the owner got it quilted and bound and it was on display! WOO HOO!!! It was really cool to see it hanging - I'd only ever seen it completed laying on the floor. I did the orca scene, the vertical columns with the daffodils and tulips, and then the three clusters on the top (grapes, cherries and berries, lilacs). The theme was the natural beauty of Washington State. She even quilted the names of all 39 counties into the quilt!

There's a label on the back with a picture of the finished top and everyone who worked on it.

Everyone did an amazing job, and I really feel like I was the least talented of this group. Having said that, I'm actually pretty pleased with most of the work I did on this quilt - especially the orcas!!! ;-)



I also got some photos to keep for inspiration for other quilts, and stuff that was just darn cool. Like I need more "ideas." One thing I saw that I may do is a Log Cabin block with animal prints... I've got a bunch of animal prints that I've been trying to figure out a layout for for over 3 years!


I also have wanted to do a black and white, and though the one I saw there wasn't terribly inspiring (well done, but I'm not going to do a Trip Around the World), I did get an idea later that has already morphed into another idea. AND... there were a couple Convergence quilts there. I did a class on that about, oh, 4 years ago and still have the pieces. I didn't know what I was going to do for it because I was making a wall hanging for someone who is no longer in my life (and he picked out the fabrics). But maybe I'll finish it up and do some appliqué on it to mix the media a little bit. I'll have to look to see how far I got and what the fabrics looks like (since the only thing I've done with it in four years is move it twice).

So, again, more projects than motivation, but at least a couple of them are small so I don't feel like I have to finish this whole big thing. I got the embroidered blocks back from Mom Saturday, but haven't taken pictures yet. We've agreed on sashing color and style, so I'll be able to start that soon, too. YAY! There's a guild sew day this Saturday, and then I'm having a friend over to sew on Sunday the 30th, so I'll have at least those two days for people to keep me on task. :-)

Well, I think that's all the excitement for now. I have a sew day on Saturday, so I'll hopefully have something to report after that. :-)

My first “lesson” on my Janomesis...

First, I need to say that I had a delightful day Saturday at my guild’s monthly sew day. I got presents (my friend Carol picks up panda stuff for me when she sees it – she’s such a sweetheart!), and I got to show my Mom a quilt live and in person that I had done a round on in our last Round Robin. She’d seen photos, but hadn’t seen it in person, and Wendy was binding the quilt on Saturday. Now I’ll be about the last person to say anything good about my work, but I really like 3/4 of what I did on Wendy’s quilt! ;-) And I got some news... Wendy is entering that quilt in the Quilter’s Anonymous show next month.... and MY NAME is on it (along with 6 others)!! I’m in the QA Show!!! ;-) Okay, so it’s silly, but I just think it’s cool saying I’m going to be in the QA show. ;-)

Sunday was another day entirely.... I have a project that I’ve been working on for a while and I’ve run out of steam before I’ve run out of fabric, so I’m going to alter the direction a little bit. I’m going to keep most of the work I’ve already done (I think), but any “new” blocks will not be the same as I’ve been making. It’s taking too long and not really seeming to look as cool as I’d hoped. Of course, the fact that I decided to make it a little more complex than it needed to be hasn’t helped matters, either. So I’ve been kicking around an idea or two for the alternate blocks, and I had some small (2-1/2) squares to play around with, so I decided to try a sliced-up nine-patch technique that I saw somewhere and probably remembered wrong, but that’s how we get creative, right? ;-) So I go to sew my patches together on a machine that’s new to me (but not “new” but it is barely used) and I see that I have no 1/4" foot. WHAT?? They give me a walking foot but not that?? It’s in the manual, so I call the dear sweet woman I bought the machine from (Mom) and ask her if she has any knowledge of where these feet would be besides the obvious. Well, she tried so hard to help, but the speculation that “maybe they didn’t come with it” only added to my frustration. THEN I tell her that my needle isn’t centered. “Did you push the button for the straight stitch in the center position?” I suddenly feel like I’m talking to the computing help desk minus the Indian accent. “Yes, Mother, the machine thinks the needle is centered.” I’m just so fit to be tied that I can’t sew and I know Mom is trying to be helpful but I just can’t be consoled at this point. So eventually we hang up (and yes, I said goodbye and I love you and I didn’t hang up on her), and I remember I have a Curvemaster foot that looks like it would fit. Okay, better than nothing. So I out that on and start sewing. Eventually my bobbin is banging and then my thread breaks. Hey, that needle not being centered is shearing the thread against the foot! GO FIGURE! Ugh. So I figure out how to move the needle over to where it should be (and thus my blocks are two different sizes, but it’s just an experiment, plus I know that I didn’t care at that point). I’m sewing my two nine-patches together, and I realize that I need to rip out four seams. Ugh. So far, I’ve learned the following on my machine: How to thread it; how to use the needle threader; how to make the needle stop in the down position; that the machine goes to sleep when I’m “unsewing”; and that if I press buttons that I don’t know what they do, the machine tells me I’m an idiot.

Back to the “experiment.” So I get these two nine-patches together (finally), and my original idea of cutting them diagonally and sewing them together with their opposite-value counterparts just wasn’t looking right (and yes, I was smart enough to fold them and look before I cut them, wonder of wonders). I cut the blocks in half each direction and ended up with little squares that reminded me of my friend Debi’s Turning Twenty blocks... Interesting. I wonder if that’s how they’re done. Anyway, so how do I want to put these little things together? I played around a little bit and decided that the largest squares look best in the middle, so they find of look “framed.” I think that will echo the style of the existing blocks the best. Do I have a picture? Of course not! First, I didn’t take a picture, and second, even if I had, GUESS WHAT! I went upstairs TOTALLY frustrated with my Janome and was going to blog while the fire was fresh, and my computer decided it wasn’t going to cooperate! I couldn’t even get the thing to open a browser! Ugh! After about 20 minutes, I got the thing to get to a place where I could tell it to restart and then I went and took a nap! :-p Here's a photo of the experiment.

Sunday evening Mom called. I was playing games on my cell phone and wasn’t in the mood to talk, and even though DH Bill and Mom both knew that was probably the case, I ended up saying hi to Mom. She asked if she could make me feel better. I told her she could try. ;-) She said she found a little box with feet that look like they don’t go to her Pfaff or her Viking, so we may be in business! YAY! It almost made me feel better. I’d feel MUCH better if I could get that needle to start in the center of the machine. :-( All in all, it was a learning experience, and after almost 24 hours I’m mentally and emotionally almost ready to go talk to the machine again. My dissertation here doesn’t really describe the frustration I felt of not being able to just turn on the machine and sew. It also didn’t end up as humorous as I was hoping. Oh, well. Maybe next time (or not).

Some completed project photos

They are few and far between, but here they are!

Tissue Covers 2008



Placemats 2007


Mom's Quilt 2006


Baby Quilt 2005


Pillow 2004(2003?)


Mystery Quilt 2004



Baby Quilt 2003





Baby Quilt 2003





Grandma's Quilt 2003 - my first quilt!!!

HEY! What happened to the picture???? Ugh! I hope I remember where I saw it on my hard drive. :-\

To blog or not to blog...

I wrote my first blog on MySpace in 2006. It was a short rambling of whether or not I should blog. A friend told me she had started blogging, but the thought of reading someone’s diary online just didn’t sound appealing from either viewpoint. Eighteen months later, I’ve decided that I’ll give the whole blog thing a shot. Every once in a while I have something halfway interesting to say. I’m enjoying the recent ability to keep up with peoples’ goings-on at my leisure, and being able to read what I’d like to and skip what I’d like to. I expect you to do the same.

I have to be honest I've rarely read a blog in its entirety. I have the attention span of a goldfish – two laps around the bowl and it’s a whole new day! I get email from people and I can't even get through their entire email (they may or may not be lengthy – I just swim faster some days than others). I can't even read through emails I've written most of the time. I've written emails to people and then changed a few things around and sent it to another person to make them think I've written it just to them... blogging is kind of the same thing, isn't it? Except that I can’t change it to make you think I sent it just to you. But I have, because you’re reading it. ;-)

What I do in my daily life is of little interest to most people, as I perceive myself as having “no life.” That’s not to say I’m unfulfilled... I’m just boring. ;-) No one wants to read about a life that consists of getting up, going to work, going home, going to bed, with a meal or two thrown in and a work anecdote that I really shouldn’t share. But, you know what? If you really have nothing better to do than read my ramblings, maybe I shouldn’t deny you the privilege. But don’t expect me to post every day. You wouldn’t want that – TRUST me!

Another view about sharing my life (or lack thereof, reference above), is that it’s not as if I have nothing to say and that nothing is ever "new." If that were the case, I'd never email or message my friends. Truth be known, I have plenty to say. Those who know me well know that! The trouble is, most of the “interesting” things in my life are not about me, but about those who grace my life. Most of the time, the things I would write are not things that I would want them to necessarily know I think about the way they grace my life. Certainly I would change the names to protect the innocent (or guilty, as the case may be), but they still could know what I actually thought. I'm not sure I'm ready for that. And, there’s always the Thumper school of philosophy: “If you can’t say something nice....” Particularly in writing on a public forum. There are so many things I WANT to say and CAN’T! LOL!

So, for now, you’ll hear about wedding pictures and making my craft room workable after buying a house last year, and probably some silly stuff about my husband, cat, or mother. Occasionally I’ll talk about something I found interesting (like watching a show about supernovae History or Discovery Channel recently and hearing the phrase, “cosmic conundrum.” Now THERE is a beautiful piece of writing right there!). But until then I’m hoping to use this forum to be accountable to “the world” (whomever that may be) to get some craft projects done to share the way my friend Grace has done. Oh, and you HAVE to read Grace’s entry about her dog getting sprayed by a skunk! Let her misery be your entertainment! Not only was I entertained by her description, I became once again thankful that I have an indoor cat! Phew!

Well, off I go to contemplate my next blog... the suspense is killing you, isn’t it? ;-)